“At thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore” (Ps. 16: 11)
Growing Dominion, Part 165
“He that by usury and unjust gain increaseth his substance, he shall gather it for him that will pity the poor”
(Prov. 28:8)
Usury is a big subject, but in this case we can limit our treatment of it. Let us leave aside for the moment the question of interest on business investments and so forth—not because such discussions are unimportant, but rather because something else is more pressing. The Hebrew form of parallelism helps us to see what is in view here. The contrast of the second half of the proverb shows us a person who will pity the poor. This means that the fellow in the first half of the proverb, the one exacting usury, and profiting by “unjust gain,” is obviously not pitying the poor. This means that his usury is directed at them—he is a scam artist, a loan shark. He squeezes his profits out of the poor, and all his substance is being raked together for the man who is open-handed to the poor.
A recent news story concerned troubled credit card companies dropping customers who had a good credit rating, who didn’t miss their payments, and who used their credit cards responsibly. And why? Because the companies were not really making any money off those responsible people. They needed to keep the shaky credit customers (not those who default entirely), because that is where the money is. If a credit card company were a dairy, customers with troubled or shaky credit would be the cows.